Thursday, September 22, 2011

Biden Flashback: 'Recovery Act Has Had an Unprecedentedly Low Level of Fraud'

“Sheriff” Joe Biden’s remarks could come back to haunt him when it comes to Solyndra, the solar company that went bankrupt after winning a $535 million loan guarantee from 2009’s economic stimulus package.

President Obama named his vice president the sheriff of the stimulus, and Biden’s duties were to ensure that no money was wasted in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Biden, a key figure in any White House negotiation with leaders on Capitol Hill, has boasted of his success in limiting fraud and waste in the stimulus.

“Now, there were a lot of naysayers back then who said that there was no way we could implement the Recovery Act without massive waste, fraud and abuse,” Biden said in a June 13 post on the White House blog announcing the new “Campaign to Cut Waste,” which was to root out wasteful government spending at every agency and department.

“You know what? They were wrong. Thanks to our diligence (and some help from advanced computer models and sophisticated data analysis), the Recovery Act has had an unprecedentedly low level of fraud, with less than 0.6 percent of all awards experiencing any waste or abuse.”

Obama asked Biden to reprise his sheriff role Wednesday, appointing him to lead a review of how agencies spend taxpayer dollars following a Justice Department report that found “extravagant” spending on conferences, including $16 muffins.

The Solyndra controversy represents a small portion of the total stimulus funds, but it still strikes at the administration’s promise to prevent fraud and waste. And Biden finds himself in the middle of the controversy.

Republicans argue the White House rushed the loan to Solyndra so that Biden could announce it at a company event in 2009, when the administration was pushing green energy as a way to create jobs.

According to Obama flunky Jay Carney, this was merely an "investment" that didn't pan out. Nothing to see here, move along.

"The reason why fledgling, cutting-edge industries need this kind of assistance is because they can be high risk as well as high reward," White House press secretary Jay Carney said. He also observed that "what happened here is an investment did not pan out."

Um, so why not let everything out in the open rather that running for cover and stonewalling investigators?

As Republican lawmakers begin to dig into the White House's cozy relationship with a startup wireless company and the wealthy Democratic donor who owns it, a new character has appeared on the story's edges: liberal superdonor, conservative bete noire and controversial investor George Soros.

Soros reportedly invested in the telecom company LightSquared through a hedge fund, and many of the nonprofits he finances have backed LightSquared in regulatory and policy disputes.